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Friday, 23 March 2012

Random Thoughts

Beware:
Niall Ferguson is Invading the Small Screen (again)

Niall
Ferguson is a Glasgow born British historian who is professor of History at
Harvard University as well as Harvard Business School.

In recent
years Ferguson has popped up on British television to present series which are
notable for his (by now customary) shtick of adopting a predetermined
position on an issue (which usually flies in the face of what almost everyone else
thinks) and doggedly going about looking for any scrap of evidence that might
support it.

Last year
Ferguson presented a four-part series entitled the decline of the Western
Civilization (Civilization: is West A History?) and how the Eastern
Civilizations, in particular Chinese, were going to take over the world. He
spent all the four episodes hectoring (in a voice that is perpetually addressed
to the back of the auditorium) about the superiority of the Western
Civilization and how in the last 400 years the West, by dint of (what he
described as) ‘killer aps’ overtook the Chinese and the Ottomans. So if you
watched the series, fooled by its title, wanting to know whether the days of
Western Civilization were indeed numbered, you would have been (depending on
your disposition) disappointed (I thought Western Civilization was f**ked, but
this guy is saying we still have all these ‘killer aps’) or relieved (I thought
Western Civilization was f**ked, but this guy is saying we still have all these
‘killer aps’).

A word about
Ferguson’s style of presentation. Irritating doesn’t even come close to
describe it. He seems perpetually in the midst of desperately (but
ineffectually) trying to control his excitement. Anything and everything he
says is said in a manner of adolescent who is describing to his mates how he
nailed the girl with the biggest t*ts in the class. Here is a man who
fell head over heels in love with the sound of his own voice years ago, and the
love affair shows no signs of fading. (Like most right wing historians the man
is thick of skin, merciless of purpose, does not suffer from namby-pamby liberal sentiments, and certainly does not
shy away from self-aggrandizing.)

Last week
Channel 4 aired the first of yet another series on China by Ferguson, entitled China:
Triumph and Turmoil. Ferguson spent the whole of the one hour of the
episode wailing about how Mao Tse Tung is still revered in China even though
the man was a monster and responsible for the deaths of more than 35 million
people. (At least he killed his own people and didn’t go around invading other
countries and killing civilians of those countries.) Mao, Ferguson informed,
his lips quivering with excitement, killed far more people than Hitler and—a
couple of seconds pause, here, with Ferguson’s eyes the size of a
Frisbee—even Stalin. (My God! The man must be a real monster! One can just
about stomach that he killed more people than Hitler, who was all said and
done, responsible for the deaths of a mere 5-6 millions: Jews, travellers,
mentally ill and mentally handicapped. But killing more people than Stalin? No!)
However hard he tried Ferguson simply could not come to terms with this
apparent paradox in the Chinese society,
which remains a Communist dictatorship yet has embraced free-market economy
with the zeal of Lib Dems joining hands with the Tories to destroy what is left
of the NHS. He could not understand why,
above all, the cult of Mao-worship continues in China when Mao heaped
unspeakable misery on his people in the 1950s with his ‘Great Leap Forward’,
which essentially resulted in a man-made famine; and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ (in the 1960s).
Ferguson went round the country speaking to Chinese people—a bunch of old
ladies gathering in a public garden and banging benches as they sang songs
praising Mao; an entrepreneur (who seemed to have taken the tubercular look to
its natural conclusion) who spent 9 months in jail during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ for his treasonous capitalist views (he got away lightly, if you ask me); a farmer—smiling broadly, his
teeth arranged neatly like stacks of shelf inside his mouth—who, along with
some other farmers, came out openly against the collective ownership of the
farms (after Mao’s death, it should be noted)—asking them this question again
and again. And the Chinese, with
beatific smiles, answered at length which threw absolutely no light on the
matter. No wonder Ferguson looked madder than a hatter at the end of it all. I
don’t think people like Ferguson will ever understand the Chinese mindset.
This, after all, is a nation whose leader (Deng Xiaoping—yes the same one who
dumped all of Mao’s Communist policies after his death and led his country
towards a market economy, and who, in 1989, sent the army to the Tiananmen
Square), when asked to comment on the French Revolution said that it was too
early to tell.

After a
while it just got boring and repetitive; and even the inadvertent comic relief
Ferguson provided, by attempting Chinese greetings when he met his
interviewees, making a noise that sounded like the braying of a fatally injured
donkey, was not enough to relieve the monotony.

The
programme had no depth; nothing interesting or insightful was provided by way
of information about the most populous nation on earth. Admittedly it is not
easy to impart great wisdom and knowledge in the form of bite-size information
for the consumption of the attentionally challenged; but Ferguson did not even
try. Disappointing? Not really, you don’t really expect anything else from him.

Will
China Save the World’s Economic Woes?

I don’t
know about you, but from my cubby hole I am closely following the global
markets and how they are ‘behaving’.

There are
many experts (none of whom saw the 2008 crash coming) who seem to have pinned their
hopes on China. They have convinced themselves with the fervour of a zealot
that Chinese economy is going to grow and grow.

These
experts go on and on about the miracle of Chinese economy in the last 30
years. That is as may be, but the fact remains that the Chinese institutions
haven’t kept pace with the economic reforms and haven’t positioned themselves
accordingly. It might not have made much difference in the 1980s when China was
recovering from Mao’s disastrous policies and taking tiny steps towards market
economy, but as China is getting richer (but still not as rich as America,
based on which indices you follow) these things will bite. Let’s not also
forget that this is still a country with one party Communist dictatorship. The
state holds almost all of China’s industry.

An
inevitable consequence of totalitarian dictatorship is that the regime cooks up
figures to avoid any unrest within its population, and one way to keep everyone
in line is to tell them again and again that things are rosy when they aren’t.

Therefore,
when the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao cut the growth forecast to 7.5%, one
wondered how low it actually was. It is also clear that Chinese exports will
suffer as the demand for low-cost Chinese trinkets in Europe and America will
reduce.

The
reduction in China’s growth will have a direct impact on the commodity market.
In the last few years China alone was responsible for 40% of the consumption of
raw metals like copper and aluminium. The demand for the raw metals (and other
metals such as iron ore) will go down. (The mining giant BHP Bilton has
announced a fall in its profits due to the anticipated reduction in the demand
for copper from China). Which means (and I admit to a feeling of schadenfreude as I type this) that the Australians, who
have so far avoided the economic downturn by piggy-backing China, will face the
heat. (Their problems will most probably be compounded by the housing
bubble the country still seems to be in the midst of, and which is sure to burst in the next 2-3 years.)

The more
worrying is that China’s politics has not really moved at all, which means that
with the economic slowdown there is a risk that China’s politics will become
repressive at home and aggressive away from it. Already China has massively upscaled
its defence budget and I can’t imagine China’s giant neighbour India being too
chuffed about it. China continues to invest in Iran, which is calculated to
make the Western sanctions ineffectual. There is a risk that Israel (with her
semi-deranged prime-minister) will increasingly turn to military means with
(outwardly) reluctant backing of America. China’s disruptive meddling in the
Middle East is (at least partially) to be blamed for the high oil prices.

What China
(and the world) really needs is political reform that would enable changes in
its banking system, removal of unproductive state investments, and, eventually,
a smooth transition to consumer-influenced economy.

But that is
not going to happen any time soon. China, as the cliché goes, is heading for a
hard landing.

India’s
Sachin Tendulkar Creates History

An American
friend of mine does not get cricket. He thinks it is too long and too
complicated. No game, he says to me, should be this complicated and long.

A few years
ago, I gave my friend a novel entitled Netherlands by the American author
Joseph O’Neill, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (and was described
as a masterpiece in some American reviews). The novel tells the story of a
Caribbean man of Asian descent wanting to revive cricket in America. The novel informed
that baseball really took off in America in the first two decades of the 20th
century. Before that, apparently, cricket was played widely. (I don’t know
whether this is true; I am not a baseball fan.) My American friend read the
book and his comment was he was glad that he did not live in the 19th
century being forced to watch cricket. His theory is Americans being the clever
entrepreneurs removed all the boring aspects of cricket and invented a game
that was more entertaining and finished quickly (but not so quickly that they
didn’t have time to eat popcorns from packets the size of single storey houses
and drink coke in quantities that would flood Wales) . ‘Who has the time,’ he
asks me, ‘to watch a game that goes on for days?’ Obviously not the Americans.

In one of
his travel books (I forget which) American writer Bill Bryson (who is very popular in the UK)
remarked that if he were to develop serious physical illness and the doctors
advised rest and strictly no excitement, he would immediately take up cricket.

I used to
be interested in cricket many moons ago; then, as I grew older, I lost my
interest in the game (and decided to focus my dwindling powers of concentration on women's tennis). Last year, thanks to an Indian
friend, I started watching cricket again. I watched the Cricket World Cup,
which, much to the delight of my friend, India won. Since then my liking for
the game is rekindled, and I have been following the game with a modicum of
interest.

This brings
me to Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar is a diminutive Indian batsman with a baby
face and a mop of curly hair who has broken every possible batting record in
cricket’s history. This guy is quite a phenomenon. He was picked up to play for
his country when he was still in his nappies and has been playing international
cricket for more than two decades. I think that is really remarkable: it is not
easy to keep your fitness and motivation, and above all, perform consistently for such a long period of time.

And now
Tendulkar has broken yet another record. Rather he has created it, as no one
before him has managed to reach this milestone. He has scored a century of
international hundreds. In cricketing terms that is absolutely stupendous. It
is the tennis equivalent of a player winning grandslams 20 times. (The player
who has scored the highest number of international hundreds for England is
Graham Gooch—an ugly player to watch; he had no grace— and he has scored 28
international hundreds. This gives some idea of the sheer scale of Sachin Tendulkar’s achievement.

Tendulkar
may even be the most popular sportsman in the history of sports. Apparently he
is number one sportsman in India for several years (that is almost a billion
people). Add to this his fans in other cricket playing countries (save England,
of course; if the articles in the British broadsheets, full of vinegary prose,
poisonous asides and mischievous innuendoes about Tendulkar’s feat, are anything to go by, he does not have many fans in England other than those amongst the
Indian Diaspora, although I don't see Tendulkar losing much sleep over it; also we are a football-mad nation, not that we have done
anything of note for decades), and he can easily boast of a fan-following of
more than a billion. I can’t imagine any other sportsman having this huge a
fan-following.

Tendulkar’s
feat of hundred international hundred is an astounding feat, and don’t think it
will ever be matched. He seems to be one of those players who come along once
in several generations. Three cheers for Sachin Tendulkar.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.